Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Weights isn't Open Training

workshoplabs.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#11

Post by addiefoote8 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

"open training" is something that won't ever happen for large scale models. For one, probably everyone's training datasets include large amount of questionable material: copyrighted media first and foremost (court cases have shown that AI models can regurgitate entire books almost verbatim), but also AI slop contaminating the dataset, or on the extreme end CSAM - for Grok to know how the intimate bits of children loo…

I agree full transparency on data adds several other challenges. Still, even releasing the software and infrastructure aspects would be a huge step from where we are now. Also, some recent work has shown pretraining filtering to be possible and beneficial which could help mitigate some concerns of sensitive data in the datasets.

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#12

Post by timmg »

Somewhat orthogonal but: when do we expect "volunteer" groups to provide training data for LLMs for [edit: free] for (like) hobbyist kinds of things? (Or do we?)

Like wikipedia probably provides a significant amount of training for LLMs. And that is volunteer and free. (And I love the idea of it.)

But I can imagine (for example) board game enthusiasts to maybe want to have training data for games they love. Not just rules but strategies.

Or, really, any other kind of hobby.

That stuff (I guess) gets in training data by virtue of being on chat groups, etc. But I feel like an organized system (like wikipedia) would be much better.

And if these sets were available, I would expect the foundation model trainers would love to include it. And the results would be better models for those very enthusiasts.

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#13

Post by pfortuny »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

"open training" is something that won't ever happen for large scale models. For one, probably everyone's training datasets include large amount of questionable material: copyrighted media first and foremost (court cases have shown that AI models can regurgitate entire books almost verbatim), but also AI slop contaminating the dataset, or on the extreme end CSAM - for Grok to know how the intimate bits of children loo…

The human labor aspect is very little discussed and essential and very abusive, I am sure.

People think of these models as "magic" and "science" but they do not realize the immense amount (in human years) of clicking yes/no in front of thousands of pairs of input/outputs.

I worked for some months as a Google Quality Rater (wow), and know the job. This must be much worse.

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#14

Post by oscarmoxon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

"open training" is something that won't ever happen for large scale models. For one, probably everyone's training datasets include large amount of questionable material: copyrighted media first and foremost (court cases have shown that AI models can regurgitate entire books almost verbatim), but also AI slop contaminating the dataset, or on the extreme end CSAM - for Grok to know how the intimate bits of children loo…

Agree that this makes it unlikely we see frontier training data OS'd but this is a separate problem from software and infrastructure transparency, which has none of those constraints. Training stack, the parallelism decisions, documented failure modes are engineering knowledge and there's no principled reason it doesn't ship.

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#15

Post by hananova »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

"open training" is something that won't ever happen for large scale models. For one, probably everyone's training datasets include large amount of questionable material: copyrighted media first and foremost (court cases have shown that AI models can regurgitate entire books almost verbatim), but also AI slop contaminating the dataset, or on the extreme end CSAM - for Grok to know how the intimate bits of children loo…

I’m not convinced that Grok’s dataset must contain CSAM for it to generate CSAM. Surely a combination of nude adults and clothed children would allow for it to synthesize CSAM?

(Disclaimer: I’m not in favor of AI in general and definitely not in favor of what Grok is doing specifically. I’m just entirely sold on the claim that its dataset must contain CSAM, though I think it is probably likely that it has at least some, because cleaning up such a massive dataset carefully and thoroughly costs money that Elon wouldn’t want to spend.)

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#16

Post by oscarmoxon »

timmg wrote: post #12

Somewhat orthogonal but: when do we expect "volunteer" groups to provide training data for LLMs for [edit: free] for (like) hobbyist kinds of things? (Or do we?) Like wikipedia probably provides a significant amount of training for LLMs. And that is volunteer and free. (And I love the idea of it.) But I can imagine (for example) board game enthusiasts to maybe want to have training data for games they love. Not just…

Some of this exists already in pockets (Common Crawl, The Pile, RedPajama are all volunteer/open efforts). I suppose there's no equivalent of the "edit this page and see the impact" like with have with Wikipedia. Contributing to an open dataset has no feedback loop if the training infrastructure that would consume it is closed... seems like a feedback problem.

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#17

Post by djoldman »

timmg wrote: post #12

Somewhat orthogonal but: when do we expect "volunteer" groups to provide training data for LLMs for [edit: free] for (like) hobbyist kinds of things? (Or do we?) Like wikipedia probably provides a significant amount of training for LLMs. And that is volunteer and free. (And I love the idea of it.) But I can imagine (for example) board game enthusiasts to maybe want to have training data for games they love. Not just…

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07327

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#18

Post by mnkv »

This blog post describes the basic work of a research engineer and nothing more. The amount of surprise the author has seems to suggest they haven't really worked in ML for very long.

Honestly? This is the best its ever been. Getting stuff to run before huggingface and uv and docker containers with cuda was way worse. Even with full open-source, go try to run a 3+ years old model and codebase. The field just moves very fast.

Re: Open Weights isn't Open Training

#19

Post by iamcreasy »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

"open training" is something that won't ever happen for large scale models. For one, probably everyone's training datasets include large amount of questionable material: copyrighted media first and foremost (court cases have shown that AI models can regurgitate entire books almost verbatim), but also AI slop contaminating the dataset, or on the extreme end CSAM - for Grok to know how the intimate bits of children loo…

> "open training" is something that won't ever happen for large scale models

https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus

Source: EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) has released Apertus, Switzerland’s first large-scale open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity. Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. Apertus serves as a building block for developers and organizations for future applications such as chatbots, translation systems, or educational tools. The model is named Apertus – Latin for “open” – highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented.

Post reply on HN